I know that, but I can still get caught up in my feelings. Recently I had an absolute complete meltdown over something said about me online. It was a castoff of a line, a joke the woman posted to get “oh the shade” likes and eyeballs. But I became fixated on it, imagining what I would say to her if she said it to my face, and knowing she never ever would.
I was with a friend when I saw it and held up my phone for her to see the post. I was full of “get this bitch” bravado, but she took my forearm and gently lowered it. Looking me in the eye, she said: “An empress does not concern herself with the antics of fools.”
She smiled, so I smiled. That kindness, one empress to another, one woman to another, released me from the bullshit.
BUBBA DESERVES A CODA, BECAUSE HE’S THE ONE WHO GOT ME HERE. He remained a good judge of character to the end. When Dwyane first came around, Bubba was apprehensive. One day, two full years into our relationship, the three of us were in the park and Bubba jumped up on the table where D was sitting. Bubba looked D in the eye, just like he’d done to me that morning under the bed. Then Bubba leaned in to nuzzle him. He was saying, “I like this guy.”
From where I’m writing this, I can see Bubba’s giant paw print in plaster. Yes, I really am that dog person. When he was twelve, he was given a year to live. By the grace of modern medicine and my pocketbook, we were able to keep him alive until he was thirteen. At one point we were thinking about getting him a new kidney. You had to agree to adopt the kidney-donor dog and commit to flying your sick dog up to UC Davis. Like I said, I’m that dog person. But we decided Bubba was old and it would all be too much to put two dogs through. When he finally passed, my whole circle went into mourning. If you knew Bubba, you loved Bubba.
When I call upon my ancestors and people who’ve passed to get me through something, I talk to him, too.
He saw me at my worst and my meanest, and he loved me anyway.
thirteen
WARNING: FAMOUS VAGINAS GET ITCHY, TOO
Dwyane and I are alone in the car outside the Walgreens in Miami.
“Just go in there,” I say.
“Nope.”
“You know what I use,” I say. “You’re in and out.”
“You do it.”
The subject is, of course, tampons, which I do not want to buy. Whenever I am in the feminine care section of any pharmacy, no matter how incognito I go, it’s like an alert goes out. “Attention customers, Gabrielle Union has her period. Go say hi!”
Because if he goes in, yeah, he gets swarmed, but the response is “What a catch! He buys his wife tampons!” If I go in, whether it’s a light day or it seems like I’ve been shot in my vagina, that intimate knowledge is sought out. Having knowledge about someone tending to her vagina is like sneaking a Playboy. “I saw Gabrielle Union buying tampons!” I’m a bleeding spectacle.
So you can imagine how unprepared I was when I suspected I had a yeast infection. ’Cause you know how loaded that is. Women aren’t allowed to just get yeast infections as, say, part of the body’s natural defense mechanism. We have to have caused it in some way—by wearing our underwear too tight, not changing our tampons often enough. Men can have jock itch for days and never once have to explain why.
I felt the first twinge while I was on a late-night flight to visit a guy I was dating before I married D. Let’s call him Bachelor 1. B1 was extremely hung, and at the time he was sharing a beach house with his huge penis in Miami. The plan was that I would get to his place Friday night and he would arrive the next morning. This is also a guy who didn’t believe women pooped, so a “Hey, shucks, I have a yeast infection” conversation was out of the question.
“Get thee to a CVS,” I told myself upon landing.
It was about 1:00 A.M. by the time I stashed my bags at his place and set out for the 24-7 drugstore on Miami Beach. Here’s what’s great about a pharmacy by the beach in the middle of the night: nothing. It is teeming. Full. You think you are going to find it hopping with horny teens buying condoms, but it’s a drunk in every aisle, white boys trying to figure out which cold medicines will make them higher, and, here and there, a crying girl hobbling along on one heel, looking for flip-flops. And in this particular outpost, one Gabrielle Union, trying to score some Monistat under cover of night.
I marched in, determined to be a grown woman seeing to her over-the-counter vaginal cream needs. I was about three steps in when, I swear, every head in the place turned. My eyes darted to a display by the register.
“Twizzlers!” I said, striding over and picking up that bag like it was just the thing I was after and I couldn’t believe my luck.
The guy at the register was a heavyset twenty-something who the managers probably thought looked intimidating enough to work the night shift. “Just these Twizzlers,” I said, scanning the candy display in case I had any other last-minute sugar needs.
“Are you . . .” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “How are you?”
“Do you want a bag?”
“No,” I said. “I’m good.”
Back in my car, I called a girlfriend on the West Coast. She always had an answer for everything. “Listen, I need to figure out a home remedy for a yeast infection.”
“Cranberry juice,” she said, not missing a beat. Dr. Quinn, Beverly Hills Medicine Woman. “Like, a boatload.”
“On it,” I replied. I waltzed right back into that CVS, waving hi to my register friend, as I pointed to the refrigerated section as if I had suddenly become parched. There were fifteen-ounce and sixty-four-ounce bottles of Cran-Apple, which I thought of as Regular and Maximum Strength. “Go big or go home,” I said to myself, grabbing the sixty-four with one hand.
“Thirsty,” I said to my register friend.
I drove back to B1’s house, guzzling the cranberry juice the whole way. I still felt that now familiar and becoming-more-intense-by-the-minute burning, so I called my Dr. Quinn again.
“911, what’s your emergency?” she said.
“When will it work?” I asked.
“You got a low-sugar one, right?”
“I got Cran-Apple.”
“Gab, that’s pure sugar. It will only make it worse!”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I yelled. “I just drank a half gallon of the shit.” Malpractice!
“I think we need to try yogurt,” she said. “You got to get some yogurt up in there. It will help.”
“Stay with me,” I said. I ran to B1’s fridge and scanned the paltry bachelor contents.
“Okay!” I yelled, grabbing a Dannon vanilla. The flower of the vanilla plant beckoned me back to feminine health. “Doctor, I’ll call you back,” I said.
I wiggled out of my jeans and laid paper towels on the kitchen floor. Here goes nothing, I thought. I did my best, slathering the cold yogurt all around my vagina, but I couldn’t quite get it inside to where the action needed to be.
Still lying on the floor, I reached again for the phone.
“I can’t get it in,” I nearly screamed. “It’s too thick.” The irony of saying this in the home of big-dicked B1 was not lost on me.
“You can’t, like, spoon it in there?”
“No,” I said. “And I can’t make a syringe out of a ballpoint pen. I’m not freaking MacGyver.”
She paused, as if she were consulting her witchy book of spells. “You need to make a tampon kind of thing,” she said. “Suck the yogurt into a straw, insert it in like a tampon, and you can squeeze the yogurt up in there.”
I went through every drawer in the kitchen. “What grown-up keeps straws?” I asked.
“I don’t know your life,” she said.
“You now know more than most.”
“Well, go get one,” she said. “A big, wide one. Like the ones at McDonald’s.”
I now took my yogurt-covered vagina to the McDonald’s by the Delano that was open all night. Inside, there was a long line of the drunk people who weren’t at CVS, the ones who had consumed enough alcohol
at 2:30 A.M. to give up on their diets and give in to their cravings for French fries. The Girl Scout in me felt like I had to wait in line and at least buy a drink, but soon enough people started to recognize me.
So I jumped off the line and went right to the straw dispenser. I ripped the paper off and held it to my eye like a pirate with a telescope. “That should do it,” I said aloud turning to see an employee stopping the work of sweeping to stare at me.
“Hi,” I said, a little too loudly, grabbing a second one to ensure the sterility of this new medical tool. “You have a nice night.”
While driving, I tried to calm my frayed nerves by imagining what that woman would tell her friends the next day. “Gabrielle Union was in here high as a kite looking for a coke straw!” Miraculously, this line of thinking did little to calm my frayed nerves.
Back at B1’s, I learned that sucking yogurt through a straw is a little tougher than you’d think. But I did it. And once again I lay on the floor to squeeze the yogurt in. Whether it was psychosomatic or just psycho, I immediately felt like it was working. I hit redial.
“Is this the Dannon help line?” I asked.
“Dannon?” she said. “I hope you used plain.”
“Shit, he only had vanilla.”
“Christ,” she said, laughing, “what is wrong with you?”
“That,” I said, peering down at my yogurt vagina, “is a very fair question.”
The absurdity of the whole night washed over me and I finally laughed. I was so scared of being judged for being a woman with a yeast infection that I was willing to put myself through any number of humiliations. I waltzed into a CVS, twice, and never left with what I needed. I stole a straw from McDonald’s in the middle of the night! All to avoid my register friend knowing. I resolved that that would be the last night I found myself lying on some guy’s kitchen floor shoving yogurt up my hoohah. I would live a more authentic life.
To a point. B1 rolled up the next morning, and he greeted me with a kiss.
“I ate your yogurt,” I blurted out, trying very hard to seem not at all suspicious.
“Okaaaay,” he said.
“I ate it,” I said. “Just ate it.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. Which I was. I mean, what else does one do with yogurt?
fourteen
GROWN-ASS-WOMAN BLUES
We are the ladies who lunch.
I have two girlfriends around my age, Michelle and Gwen, who I meet every few months or so for lunch when I am in Los Angeles. We are grown-ass women, and we are the only ones who understand each other’s grown-ass problems.
“I apologize in advance for looking like a robot,” I said when I came to the table at our last gathering. “I threw my neck out dancing.”
“How?” asked Gwen.
“I tried to whip my hair back.”
You see? Grown-ass problems.
“At least you’re having fun,” Michelle said, with Gwen silently nodding. They are both single, Gwen newly so after a twelve-year marriage. Michelle is awesome, but she never found anyone. That’s the word she uses: “Anyone.” Not even “the right guy.” She is fun, and smart, and pretty, and she told me she feels invisible when she goes out. She sees what happens to the women her age who fight against invisibility to try to stand out. The ones who raid their daughters’ closets or the ones who try so hard to lead a boisterous Real Housewives camera-ready life with a steady supply of booze. They at least draw attention, if fleeting, but Michelle doesn’t want that. She’s stuck, because if she does what comes natural to her and keeps it low key, guys won’t even notice her. But if she shows she wants a relationship, men will flee.
“I have to act like I don’t want it,” she told me, “and then act surprised when it doesn’t happen.”
Meanwhile, Gwen is hot as hell and knows it. She got out of her marriage and went right to the bars. But that doesn’t mean the puzzle isn’t complicated for her as well.
“The men our age won’t look at me,” she said. “And I’m this weird science experiment for younger guys, chasing older pussy.”
Single or partnered, successful or striving, we grown-ass women of the world share the feeling that we’re all in an experiment that no one is particularly interested in watching except us. I see us all grasping at the straws of staying present in our lives and families and careers. Who knows how we will fare? I can only speak to my experience, so that is what I will do. To wit: Can an actress age in Hollywood and continue to work? All previous research has shown the answer to be a hearty NO, but it seems for my peers that so far, we are working way more than then we did in our twenties. But it’s the opposite for my nonactor friends as they get older. Their competition for new jobs is younger people who make less and don’t have families that they have to take off for. Oh shit, they say, we’re those people that we pushed out. Women are told to “lean in.” Yeah, right. “Lean in so I can push you over.”
At lunch, Michelle told us about “the new black” at her company. “She’s young and dope,” she said. “And she’s talking to me about dating. I’m like, ‘Fuck you and your dating problems. You’re me twenty years ago when I used to get dick.’”
We all nodded, except me, on account of my neck. I kind of moved forward.
“I have no patience for her,” she said.
“That’s because even though there are all these things that are supposed to be marked against her,” said Gwen, “her skin color, the fact that she’s a woman—none of that matters next to the fact that you’re older. She gets your spot.”
“Yeah,” I said, swiveling my whole body to look at Michelle, “but who better to help her navigate that than you?”
“I’m not training the competition to do my job,” said Michelle. “Would you?”
Um, no. And I thought about my own hypocrisy: Just the night before I had attended a pre-Oscar cocktail party for women in film. There I had met a young actor named Ryan Destiny. She had appeared in the Lee Daniels series Star. I had heard that she looked like me. I saw her in person and she looks like I literally gave birth to her. Gab 2.0, only better.
“Oh my God,” she said. “I am finally meeting you. This is so amazing.”
“What are you, twelve?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Shit.”
“I admire you so much,” she said. “If you could mentor me . . .”
Bitch, fuck you, I thought. You want me to mentor you? The press is literally calling you the next Gabrielle Union . . . “except she can sing and dance!”
I smiled, and the photographers came over. They needed to document this moment of “Look who’s old!” And I get it, because I have a reputation for never aging. And God, do I love that rep. But as the flashbulbs went off, I was suddenly terrified that the ruse would be up. Dorian Gray, turning to dust as she is photographed next to someone called the next Gabrielle Union.
Looking at Michelle and Gwen, I remembered not just the fear of suddenly looking decrepit next to this young woman, but the wave of panic that if I imparted my knowledge, I would lose in some kind of way. Would I be aiding and abetting myself into forced retirement and exile by helping this drop-dead gorgeous woman? A better, hotter, more talented version of me twenty-five years ago?
To be the women my friends and I are supposed to be, we are supposed to support the women coming up behind us. It’s just hard to do that happily when you’re finally at the table, and you feel any moment someone’s going to come up, tap your shoulder, and say, “I think you’re in my seat.” It took me a long time to get that seat, goddammit. I’m not ready to move over just yet.
This fear resonates through every industry. For my friends in corporate America there’s a reasonable fear about “mentoring” young women to be their best selves if that means they could take your job. Younger women are literally dangled in front of their older peers as a you-better-act-right stick to keep older, more experienced women in line. Because we’ve all seen a pal replaced for a younger, cheaper
model with lower expectations and more free time for overtime or courting clients. Modern business is set up to squeeze out women who “want it all”—which is mostly just code for demanding equal pay for equal work. But the more empowered women in the workforce, the better. The more that women mentor women, the stronger our answer is to the old-boys’ network that we’ve been left out of. We can’t afford to leave any woman behind. We need every woman on the front lines lifting each other up . . . for the good of all of us and the women who come behind us.
It’s tough to get past my own fears, so I have to remind myself that this is an experiment, to boldly go where no grown-ass woman has gone before. When we refuse to be exiled to the shadows as we mature, we get to be leaders who choose how we treat other women. If I don’t support and mentor someone like Ryan, that’s working from a place of fear. And if I put my foot on a rising star, that’s perpetuating a cycle that will keep us all weak. The actresses in the generation before mine were well aware of their expiration dates, and they furiously tried to beat the clock before Hollywood had decided their milk had gone bad. Yes, there were some supremely catty women in Hollywood who actively spread rumors about younger stars so that they could stay working longer. But there were also way more amazing women who thought big picture. They trusted that if they uplifted each other, in twenty years, there might just be more work to go around. Women like Regina King, Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell-Martin, and Jenifer Lewis went out of their way to mentor and educate the next generation. That empowerment is why we have Taraji P. Henson, Kerry Washington, Viola Davis, Sanaa Lathan, and more starring in TV shows and producing films. That creates yet more work for the next woman up. That’s what can happen when we mentor and empower. That’s what happens when we realize that any joy we find in the next woman’s pain or struggle is just a reflection of our own pain: “See how hard this is? Do you appreciate how difficult this is?” Instead, I want to heal her and me.
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